Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 today 1xbet promo code Guinea-Bissau

Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

…capitalism and the military industrial complex and bore no resemblance to today’s praise songs. What did my friends and I do when we saw the photo of Jerry Falwell? We laughed. He seemed a buffoon, and we couldn’t believe that anyone would ever take him seriously. We had no idea what lay ahead. This all came back to me because of another article in the New York Times—a piece published on April 6—“The Growing Religious Fervor in the American Right…

Read More

The Non-Existent Tea Party-Religious Right God Gap

…ts back to one that many speakers, including Reed and Gingrich, emphasized today: that not only did God ordain a limited role for government, God, and not the government, is the source of individual rights. “God gives you sovereignty,” said Gingrich, and “the government doesn’t define rights.” In other words, if the government tells you to buy insurance under the individual mandate, it’s not only infringing on your God-given rights, but exceeding…

Read More

How Not to Oppose the National Day of Prayer

…U.S.C. § 119 from law. But this year the American Humanist Association is promoting an opposition effort that is fundamentally misguided. Rather than call for its elimination, the AHA wants the annual observance to be replaced by a new “National Day of Reason.” According to its official website, a National Day of Reason would, of course, “celebrate reason,” but it would also “raise public awareness about the persistent threat to religious liberty…

Read More

How “Gratitude” Underwrites Inequality, Power, and Exclusion

…rket. But it does seem that the two opposing traditions have come together today to act as a powerful rhetoric of gratitude as indebtedness. Today we have a thriving self-help industry that churns out a steady stream of books on pop psychology, happiness, and gratitude. How well do these grapple with the issues you’ve raised? I was a little surprised by how little attention is paid to the history of gratitude in the self-help literature. I see my…

Read More

The People’s Temple, the Black Church, and the Tragic Legacy of Jonestown

…sed visibility of the black atheist community. Is that growth we’re seeing today influenced by the way the Bible was historically used to justify the degradation of black people? I absolutely think that is the motivation for many African-American nonbelievers. That the whole Curse of Ham lore, the justification of slavery, the justification of rape and commodification of black women’s bodies— all of that plays a big role in the embrace of atheism…

Read More

Huckabee Launches Videos to Teach Kids About American Exceptionalism

…r children a historically accurate and unbiased education that allows kids today to enjoy and understand our history, and build their pride in our great nation.” Learn Our History’s messages are all geared to promoting the idea of American Exceptionalism, and from the clips, they appear to be delivered with all the subtlety and Cold War fervor of the movie Red Dawn. From Learn Our History web site’s Frequently Asked Questions: What does it mean th…

Read More

Disaster Theology: Blame and Powerlessness in Japan

…, “I hate to say, ‘I told you so’—but I told you so!” Fortunately, we know today that tsunamis are caused by earthquakes and other forms of seismic activity, and that seismic activity is caused by a shift in tectonic plates. We can’t predict exactly when they’re going to shift, but we are increasingly certain that they don’t do so in response to the immorality of the people in the countries where they occur. There are plenty of evil people living…

Read More

Colorado Springs Massacre Captures the Christian Nationalist ‘Monster In The Mirror’

…nationalism dates back to the pilgrims, my series examines how features of today’s God-and-country ideology owe a particular debt to the obsessions that transfixed the popular culture of Britain in the 1890s: the supposed “hordes” of immigrants diluting the nation’s racial stock; melancholy over the putative “weakness” of a once-great nation; panic over non-straight public expressions of sexuality; a sci-fi tinged apocalypticism, in which heroes a…

Read More

Sex and the Ummah

…n’t seem to realize that the kinds of same-sex relations that are going on today are not like same-sex relations at other times in human history. There were always people of the same sex having sexual relations, but today there are new claims. It’s like our proposals for more equality in marriage over and against the patriarchal marriage of the past. Same-sex couples are making claims as families and asking for thing like marriage. Same-sex Muslim…

Read More

Churches Can No Longer Hide the Truth: Daniel Dennett on the New Transparency

…hat’s a projection, and it’s based on the analysis of trends that are seen today. My suspicion is that they are underestimating the importance of this new transparency. It takes twenty years to grow a Baptist, and twenty minutes to lose one. And I think that people may be in for some real surprises in those areas. After all, it’s only been a decade or two that this has been an issue for Muslim children. Are they going to let their children have ce…

Read More